Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  We went to bed happy. For the first time in two months we didn’t have the sound of gunfire in our ears. We were in a dry warm attic above the restaurant, in a real bed. A friend was looking after us.

  Our host awakened us at dawn; he wanted us out of G. before Polish police or German patrols appeared on the road leading out of the town. The peasant who agreed to take us in his cart was willing to go quite a long distance west, beyond W. He had in mind a village where he often delivered samogon, home-distilled vodka. That village turned out to be Piasowe. Like most peasant carts, his was a long contraption with four high wheels, pulled by a single horse. The bottom was made of three wide boards. The sides were ladders fixed at a wide angle to the bottom. The peasant sat on a board fixed across the ladders. There was some hay in the cart on which Tania and I stretched out. It was a very good feeling to have taken a bath and be wearing clean clothes. Our stomachs were full; we looked at fields and stands of trees slowly going past us. We were not particularly afraid. Our host had given us some bread and cheese to take along for a second breakfast. We decided to eat it right away. The peasant kept his horse going at a good pace, as though he had been schooled by my grandfather. A couple of times he stopped to urinate at the side of the road. He asked if we also wanted to relieve ourselves; Tania’s continence amused him.

  We rolled on. When W. appeared in the distance, he slowed down and explained that he was going to leave the highway to avoid going through the town. He would take advantage of the detour to feed the horses and get something to eat for himself and for us. After traveling a considerable distance over lanes just wide enough for the cart, we turned into a village and then into a farmyard. A great deal of persuasion was needed to quiet the dogs so that Tania and I were able to get off and eat more bread and cheese and drink buttermilk. Our peasant talked to his friends and then lay down in the barn for a loud nap. The sun began to seem low to Tania. She roused the peasant, and soon we were on the road again. Night was falling when we arrived in Piasowe at the house of the peasant called Komar, on whom Tania concentrated all her charm. She wanted him to help us get established in the village.

  Komar was the entrepreneur of Piasowe. His two sons-in-law helped with the land and left him free to run his businesses, the most important being the little shop in his house from which he sold wares like salt, matches and nails. The principal merchandise, however, was vodka, or samogon passing for vodka, or samogon undisguised. Liquor could be bought by the bottle, when a peasant felt ready to pay for a night of oblivion, or consumed more modestly by the glass on Komar’s premises in the company of neighbors. It was Komar who drove grain to the mill and brought back flour. He took potatoes, beets, butter and cheese to the market in W. and came back with town goods that he had bought or bartered on order. There were other householders in Piasowe who had horses—they used them to work their fields and also the fields of others for pay or in exchange for help with the harvest—but in addition to his pair of horses, Komar had a head for figures, and felt none of the disquiet that possessed the other peasants at the thought of trotting down the highway, away from Piasowe. For a long moment it seemed as though Komar would become our employer: Tania was proposing to keep his books, sell his vodka and, in her spare time, teach his grandchildren. Then Komar changed his mind: too many people passed through his place every day, and they were not always peasants. Old Kula was the man; he needed help with the harvest. Komar would take us to him.

  Kula and his family had finished the day’s work when we entered their house, preceded by Komar. They were in a large kitchen, about to eat the evening meal. Tania and I stood in the door while Komar greeted the Kulas, inquired about the progress of the harvest and then talked about us. I looked around the kitchen, trying not to turn my head. The floor was made of very white planks, the table was a long rectangle of dark wood. The walls were whitewashed; near the door opposite us that seemed to lead from the kitchen to the yard hung a black icon, a copy of the Virgin of Czestochowa. A naphtha lamp stood on the table, its wick turned up to throw a large round of yellow light. A candle was burning in a holder nailed to the wall under the icon.

  Having listened to Komar’s explanation, Kula got up and looked us over carefully and unsmilingly. Tania apparently understood what was disturbing him and took the initiative. She bowed to him and in the direction of Kulowa and said that they must not worry about our being city people, unable to work hard. She was healthy and strong. I was a well-behaved and obedient boy. If they took us in, and showed us how to do the tasks that were to be done, we would not let them down and God would repay their kindness. She was not asking for wages; just a corner of the kitchen where we might sleep and a place at their table. After a lengthy silence, during which Tadek and Masia also got up to gape at us, Kula nodded agreement. Kulowa motioned for us to sit down on the bench beside her, Masia brought plates and spoons for our soup and boiled potatoes, Kula got a bottle of vodka and filled glasses for himself, Tadek and Komar. The deal was done.

  Inspired by Tania’s example, I seized Kulowa’s forearm with both hands and deposited a slow and ceremonious kiss on her elbow. My readings in Sieńkiewicz had taught me that this was an ancient Polish gesture of respect. I could not have aimed better. Kulowa may have been more surprised than moved, but she embraced me and became a shield against Kula’s bad temper. After the third glass of vodka, Komar left. It was time to settle for the night. Kulowa produced a huge burlap sack and sent Masia to the barn to fill it with straw. When that was done, she showed Tania how to sew its end closed so it would become our mattress, and she gave us a feather bed to sleep under. Masia brought her bedding from the only other room in the house, where she told me the parents slept, and put it on the floor near the stove. We would be against the wall, on the other side of the kitchen. During these preparations, Tadek left. I asked Masia where he slept. She giggled. Tadek liked to be near the animals. He slept in the hayloft, above the cows. One other arrangement remained to be made: Kula said he would leave the dog on the chain this first night. When we needed to relieve ourselves, we could go behind the barn.

  TO HARVEST the potatoes, one dug around them first with a hoe. When the soil was sufficiently loosened, one could pull them up with one’s hands. The next step was to throw the potatoes into a basket. Then one lugged the basket to the lane between the fields, where the cart would eventually come, and heaped the potatoes on a big pile. When Kula stopped the cart next to the pile, the potatoes were loaded on by hand or with a pitchfork. The piles had to be large enough so that Kula’s time would not be wasted; he didn’t want to make too many stops. Tania and Masia hoed and pulled up the potatoes, and I put them in the basket and staggered with it to the piles. When I fell behind, they would stop their work and help me. Soon Tania’s hands were badly blistered. Masia gave her strips of cloth to tie around them. I tried to use the hoe in Tania’s place, but I was not strong enough to go fast.

  We needed to hurry because the beets had to be done next and sent to W. before there was any risk that they might freeze. On the other hand, if they were taken out of the ground too early, warm weather would make them ferment. At noon, Kulowa came into the field with boiled potatoes and buttermilk. Afterward, we worked again until dusk. It took many days to finish the potatoes. Then came time for Kula’s beets. Tania’s blisters had broken; hard calluses replaced them. When we lay down at night, she would ask me to rub her back as long as I could stand it. She said that in the field she sometimes thought she could never straighten herself again. Our shoes disintegrated. Tania bought wooden clogs from Komar. We learned to wear them like everybody else in Piasowe.

  Kula decided that Masia did not need both Tania and me for the potatoes; I would go out with the cows so he would no longer have to pay Stefa’s father to have her look after them. Stefa showed me how to get the cows out of their stalls in the morning, after Masia had milked them, and get them moving in the direction of the rest of the herd. In the beginning, I was scared of the cows but managed to
hide my fear enough so that Stefa and the boys wouldn’t despise me. Also, I was repelled by the sight and smell of manure in the barn and in the yard and the globs of dung that stuck to the cows’ sides. When we gathered turds for our fire, I dreaded mistakenly picking up one that was not dry underneath and getting my fingers covered with dung. Quite soon, I learned that Kula’s cows were lazy and pacific; I also found out which of the other cows were bad tempered and learned to watch out for their horns.

  As we burned our turd fires and played tricks on the cows, I began to feel that being dirty and touching dirt conferred on me a sort of freedom. In the pasture, Stefa would hitch up her skirt, the rest of us would let down our pants, and we would squat down to defecate where we happened to be. If our own turds were not perfectly formed or were too wet, and we felt the need of a wipe, it was accomplished with a handful of dry stubble. Without asking Tania, I came to the conclusion that the children I was with were not on the lookout for circumcised penises. Nonetheless, when I took out mine, as often as possible I would hold it by the end to conceal my lack of a foreskin. In the stable, I was cleaning out the stalls and pitchforking manure with enthusiasm and results that were sufficient for Kula not to comment about my work. One day, I drove the pitchfork into my foot. It made a nasty puncture wound that Tania tried to open so it would bleed better. She could not remember when I had last had a tetanus injection and was wild with worry. The wound healed normally while I hobbled around after the cows and did my chores.

  Soon I was able to terrorize Tania with another medical problem. For some time, we had been trying, when we were out with the cows, to smoke a mixture of dry leaves, hay and grass in a pipe that belonged to one of the boys. That led to nothing more than attacks of coughing and a burning throat. One day, Stefa got hold of a package of cigarette tobacco, which must have been of the lowest and strongest grade obtainable, tobacco then sold in Poland being, in any event, vile. We smoked this stuff as long as it lasted. When it was time to drive the cows home, I was desperately sick. I rubbed my face and hands with cow dung to mask the smell of tobacco; the stench of vomit complemented my efforts. The vomiting was followed by diarrhea that continued through the night and into the next day. I was green; my teeth chattered; I was unable to eat. Just as Tania came close to concluding I had come down with typhoid fever, I miraculously recovered. Nothing could induce me to reveal to her the true nature of my illness.

  In part this was because of Tania’s severity and particular methods of punishment. I understood her insistence on perfect behavior, or in any event behavior that corresponded to what she wanted, when the outside world was concerned. One could say that our lives depended on it. But she was equally insistent on my controlling myself and being controlled by her at times when I thought it didn’t matter, when we were alone. It may be that she thought I needed to be in constant training. More likely, it was because of the effort she was making never to lose the complete hold she had on herself and because we were constantly together. Already in T., after we had moved to our new lodgings with Pan and Pani Kramer, we slept in the same room. That stopped when we went to the apartment in Lwów that Reinhard had found. Since the day of his death, however, we had spent each night in the same bed. Some of these beds were narrow, often narrower than the straw mattress we now shared in Kula’s kitchen, where Masia’s presence on her mattress diluted our intimacy, and the rooms were themselves exiguous, yet I had never seen Tania naked. Tania undressed was Tania in her slip or Tania in her long nightgown. Her bodily functions were private, even under the most constraining conditions. On the other hand, my nakedness and my bowel and bladder movements continued to be subject to question, inspection and comment.

  Never being alone, always being with Tania, had begun in Lwów because Reinhard came only on weekends. The meals and discussions with our fellow lodgers at Pani Dumont’s were part of the joint performance we were required to give. Pani Bronicka occasionally insisted that Tania leave the room so that I would be, as she put it, less subject to telepathy, but most of the time she wouldn’t say anything and Tania would remain, her eyes on the pages of a book but in reality listening to every word that was said and noting each one of my gestures. The great exceptions were the hours we spent with my grandfather, when Tania’s attention and supervision weakened like a magnet shedding pins or nails, and the afternoons of catechism. With Father P. and his class, I was certainly putting on a show for which Tania had rehearsed me in detail, but still it was I who was putting it on, and my performance was unsupervised. Otherwise, for years it had been as Tania predicted: a day-and-night partnership of Tania and Maciek contra mundum, with the world against us. And I admired and loved my beautiful and brave aunt with increasing passion. Her body could never be close enough to mine; she was the fortress against danger and the well of all comfort; regardless of the circumstances, whether it was her nightgown not having dried or, as now at Kula’s, her no longer owning a nightgown, I waited impatiently for the nights when I knew she would come to bed wearing only a slip so that I could feel closer to her.

  During those years, when each word that she said or that was said to her had to be examined for dangers it might provoke or portend, Tania’s speech and gestures, except to my grandfather and me, were never without purpose. That purpose was to conceal and please, to concentrate attention on what might gratify the listener and deflect it from us. I played the supporting role. With me she made no effort to be pleasant; that was natural enough, and I think I did not expect anything else. But for Tania, the distinction between lack of pretense and harshness scarcely existed. Each fault of my conduct or appearance, so long as we were alone, which as I have said was almost always, became the subject of unrestrained, precise and critical comment. In a way, it was as if one performer were speaking to another about their art. And if she found my reaction to her observations foolish, or if whatever she was commenting on had really given her cause for annoyance, Tania would fall silent; she had a face of dolorous stone. Her silence could last hours or days depending on the gravity of the offense she had perceived and my pleas for forgiveness. Of course, since we were performers, the show had to go on: an immediate truce would apply, and criticisms or silence were replaced by cloying sweetness as soon as we had an audience.

  But now, at Piasowe and under Kula’s roof, we were differently situated. Every day I got up at dawn to help Masia or Kulowa milk the cows, and then I disappeared, taking the cows to pasture and returning with them just in time for the evening milking. Then, immediately, mash to be taken to the pigs or possibly something urgent to be done about the hens. Sitting at last beside Tania for the evening meal, with both elbows on the table, I would eat my soup as noisily as Tadek. Tania could not reprove me, although I knew that each slurp plunged a knife into her heart. That would have been an indirect criticism of Tadek and, as such, against her rules. In total contrast with our life in Lwów and Warsaw, in Piasowe we were never alone except at night; once the soft drone of Masia’s snoring became regular, we would whisper, holding each other tight under the feather bed as long as we could hold out against fatigue and sleepiness, but that was a time to share secrets and caresses, and not a time for Tania to be angry. And Tania could not punish me by silence; that would have been putting on a wrong sort of show for the Kulas. It was thus possible that I could have told Tania the truth, and that my unsuccessful introduction to tobacco would have only made her laugh and kiss me and say I was just like my grandfather. But fear of Tania’s punishments was only a part of what held me back with such force from confessing and made me prefer to increase her suffering as well as my own. I was chained to the habit of lying, and I no longer believed that weakness or foolishness or mistakes could be forgiven by Tania or by me.

  THE principal secret we were discussing those nights was Tania’s business venture with Komar. As soon as the potatoes and beets were done and her work changed to lighter chores, like churning cream to make butter, washing the kitchen floor, doing the laundry, and preparing
the feed for the poultry, she noticed, just as Stefa had foretold, that Kula was throwing increasingly cross looks in her direction. She took to visiting Komar before the evening meal; her work was now finished early enough to allow it. Komar talked to her about the war. His network of commercial relations was a source of unending astonishment, as was the information it brought him. She learned that the Russians were in Czechoslovakia and had crossed the Danube, the Americans and the English were almost on the Rhine; the Germans were beaten and except for us the war was practically over.

  She drank with Komar. Her ability to down anything he poured, crack jokes, and distinguish among the grades of his vodka and samogon impressed him. This schoolteacher had uncommon gifts; he told her he regretted not having kept her instead of sending us to that old fool Kula. In turn, she explained how precarious her position with Kula had become: she was wondering how many days it would be before he threw her and her son out to beg on the highway or look for the partisans in the forest. Komar grew dark with anger at the thought; indignation was father to a business proposition. With Christmas approaching, the peasants’ demand for vodka was overwhelming him. Would she become his saleswoman and courier? He would pay a commission and make an immediate advance against future earnings. Thus she could pay Kula for her lodging, I would continue to mind the cows, and we would all live happily until the Russians came and robbed us. They drank bottoms up to toast Komar’s plans. The next day, Komar called on Kula as we were eating our supper, a bottle of vodka in the pocket of his sheepskin coat. Such doubts as Kula might have initially had about letting us stay on were washed away. Before we went to sleep, Tania made her bargain with him about the money.